Architect Farshid Moussavi designed MOCA Cleveland as a city ornament, unfolding over time

View full sizeChuck Crow/The Plain DealerFarshid Moussavi, architect of the new Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland: "You aim high, and you see what's possible. And when you get that extra tightness and the squeeze [in the budget], the project gets stronger."

MOCA CLEVELAND SPECIAL REPORT

The Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland will open its striking, $27.2 million new home in University Circle to the public on Monday. To mark the occasion, The Plain Dealer will offer an eight-page special section on Sunday with stories by critic Steven Litt and photographs by Gus Chan. Follow MOCA's 44-year journey from storefront to architectural forefront, with features including a profile of star architect Farshid Moussavi, a full-page color graphic and a photo essay on the building's exhilarating, shimmering black-steel skin.

With Frank Gehry, you get shiny curves. With Daniel Libeskind, you get jagged shards. And with Farshid Moussavi, you get something different every time.

The 47-year-old London architect, a native of Iran who has become a new rising star in the world of design, has avoided giving her buildings a signature look.

Her plans for a residential complex in Nanterre La Defense, just outside Paris, call for a stack of rectangular slabs set off-kilter to one another like shuffled cards that haven't been aligned yet.

The John Lewis Department Store and Cineplex in Leicester, England, is a shimmering box veiled in multiple layers of glass imprinted with ceramic curlicue patterns that can be opaque or semitransparent, depending on the angle.

And for the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, Moussavi's first building in the United States, she has enclosed four levels of gallery, retail, office and educational spaces in a shimmering, crystalline shell wrapped in slightly undulating, reflective panels of black stainless steel.

The building, located at Euclid Avenue and Mayfield Road in Cleveland's University Circle, rises from a hexagonal base to a square top, producing facades shaped either like triangles or trapezoids. They tilt in or out, reflecting the surrounding streets and sidewalks or the sky, depending on the angle. A four-story triangle of glass on the building's northeast facade announces the lobby and main entrance; diagonal window stripes on other facades admit light to the interiors.

The effect, in Moussavi's words, is that of a building that changes through time and unfolds as you experience it in a manner similar to a movie.

"Monuments normally try to freeze reality," she said during a recent visit to Cleveland to check details before the museum opens to the public on Monday. "They are static -- they arrest time."

Her goal at MOCA was to do the opposite.

"We've been trying to embed time and to show that time changes," she said. "Whether it's the shape of the building that changes as you move around it or the reflections that change."

Change and flux are part of the architect's identity. Born in 1965 to parents who wereacademics, Moussavi grew up inSari, Iran, a city on the Caspian Sea. In 1979, when the country was racked by revolution, her parents took her to England to visit her brother, who was in boarding school. Rather than take her home to the turmoil in Iran, they enrolled her as well in an English school, where she suddenly had to be on her own and learn a new language.

"Looking back, it was really tough," she told W magazine recently. "Having to start from scratch like that makes you strong, because you lose the fear of change."

Moussavi studied architecture at the University of Dundee in Scotland, University College London's Bartlett School of Architecture and Harvard University. She later worked for Italian architect Renzo Piano and for Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas' Office of Metropolitan Architecture.

While at OMA, she met and married colleague Alejandro Zaera-Polo, with whom she established Foreign Office Architects in London in 1995. The two divorced in 2011 and set up separate offices. She now teaches part time at Harvard, while managing an architectural practice, Farshid Moussavi Architecture in London, on a sharp upward path.

Going beyondthe obvious

Petite and stylish, Moussavi shifts easily from the jargon-filled argot of architecture schools to crystal-clear descriptions of her ideas in an angular accent that makes it seem as if she's pouncing on every word.

She says the look of her buildings varies so sharply because "no two buildings give you the same set of challenges. The climate will be different, the budget will be different." She says the goal of architecture is not merely to combine all the parameters and arrive at a logical result, or to impose the architect's own aesthetic preferences, but to go beyond the obvious. It's the "beyond" that she always seeks.

"This is what architecture can add," she said.

Foreign Office Architects won the MOCA commission over five other contenders in 2006, with Moussavi as the lead designer. She prevailed over Michael Maltzan Architectureof Los Angeles, Office dA of Boston, and Reiser + Umemoto, SHoP Architects and StudioMDA, all of New York.

From that point, Moussavi and Jill Snyder, the museum's director, engaged in a lengthy to-and-fro in which fundraising through a terrible recession put pressure on the museum's evolving design, and vice versa.

Moussavi said she's disappointed that limitations to the museum's budget forced her to omit a basement for air-conditioning and heating equipment, which now occupy part of the second floor.

"We lost the battle on that," she said. "The ambition is always higher than the reality you face. It should always be this way. You aim high, and you see what's possible. And when you get that extra tightness and the squeeze [in the budget], the project gets stronger."

Flexibles spacesand a striking staircase

MOCA's building is a collection of tightly packed, flexible, interlocking spaces that can be subdivided or unified for large events. On the ground floor, for example, a lobby, lecture space and retail shop can be separated or joined, depending on the museum's needs.

The most striking aspect of the interior, aside from the midnight-blue fireproof paint on the interior of its structural shell, is the vertiginous staircase that rises from the lobby to the main exhibit gallery on the fourth floor.

Moussavi realized during the design process that she could save floor space in the tight, 34,000-square-foot building by stacking the fire stairwell immediately beneath the open, public stairwell.

"It happened at one point, and it didn't seem as exciting at the time as it did later when we came to realize the consequences. The staircase in itself is like a spectacle. At an opening, if you see somebody you don't want to talk to, you can take the route through the interior stairs. But you may be wearing the ultimate outfit and you may want to exhibit it, or you may feel very sociable." In that case, you'll take the public stairs.

Ultimately, for Moussavi, the building expresses her concept of ornament, an idea that used to be sneered at by modernist architects whose machine aesthetic required eliminating anything they considered nonessential.

Moussavi said that she considers the entire surface of the building an ornament, but that's not to say she intends it to be seen as an urban jewel. That's too literal an interpretation for her.

"I wouldn't want to give a reading to people," she said. "True icons are those that are perceived in so many different ways by so many people that they become completely embedded in people's lives."

With Moussavi's work now done, the process of embedding MOCA and its new building in everyday life in Cleveland is about to begin.